Noah's Shark: brilliant title, bad movie
It's not the Bible-meets-Jaws cross-over that you might have been waiting for.
From the ‘I Watched It So You Didn’t Have To’ files…
It’s shark season—National Geographic’s SharkFest started July 10, and the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week starts July 24—so I figured it was time I finished watching Noah’s Shark, a super-low-budget horror movie that I started watching a few months ago and then set aside because… um… I was tired and it wasn’t very good…?
Not that I was expecting Noah’s Shark to be good, exactly. Who would? But as a connoisseur of Noah movies, I felt I had to give it a shot. And hey, if the Noah’s Ark miniseries starring Jon Voight could show Noah fighting off pirates, why not a movie in which Noah has to deal with sea monsters, or a really terrifying fish?
Alas, anyone expecting a quasi-biblical take on Jaws or Moby Dick is going to be disappointed. It turns out this is just a really cheap horror movie about a reality-TV exorcist who comes across a possessed piece of wood from the Ark—and the biblical story, such as it is, is rendered only fleetingly in flashbacks and voice-overs.
Why is the wood from the Ark possessed? Apparently a demon took the form of a shark and snuck onto the Ark with the help of a forgotten fourth son of Noah’s named Zadkiel (they had aquariums on the Ark?), and Zadkiel’s actions brought a curse on the family and Zadkiel’s name was stricken from the history books—but the legend lived on, in an obscure text known as The Book of the Witch of Endor, because Zadkiel fathered a child before the Flood who was saved by a fallen angel, etc., etc., etc.
I have a feeling that, just by writing all that, I’ve already given the back-story more attention than the filmmakers did. But I can’t deny that, as sloppy as the movie is, I’m still kind of fascinated by how the mishmash of pseudo-myths is mixed with genuine Bible quotes and allusions to biblical stories. Not very fascinated, but a little.
Take the Witch of Endor, for example. The character who first mentions her says something like, “I know this Witch of Endor sounds like some sort of Star Wars thing,” but as the exorcist points out, the Witch of Endor is an actual character from the Bible who was consulted by King Saul shortly before his death.
The film also mentions that the biblical Noah cursed his grandson Canaan—the idea being that the curse of Zadkiel was just one of multiple curses in the family—and there are nods to the demon that called itself “Legion” in Mark’s gospel, the heap of stones that Jacob and Laban piled up as part of a covenant between them, and so on.
Throw in the reference to “Kirk Cameron Bible college” and one character’s comment that megachurches are such an ’80s thing, and you begin to wonder about the denominational or religio-cultural background of the filmmakers themselves.
We don’t get to see that much of Noah or the shark, which is just as well, considering how fake they both look. Noah sports a beard so false that even some church drama departments would balk at using it. (It’s possible that what we’re seeing is not supposed to be Noah himself, but a depiction of Noah from a film-within-the-film made by a friend of the exorcist’s, but even so…) As for the shark, when the film isn’t using stock documentary footage, it’s using a cheap, puffy puppet for the scenes where the shark starts leaping out of shallow lakes and biting into people’s heads.
And it’s not just the special effects that bring Edward D. Wood movies to mind. The acting, too, falls into that range where you’re not sure how much of it is intentionally deadpan and how much of it is just dead. And as for the dialogue… Well, here’s a sampling:
A possessed woman accuses the exorcist of abusing her, and her mother exclaims, “You’re just as bad as any other priest! … And you’re not even on basic cable.”
After the exorcist steps on a mouse (because a demon was cast into the mouse, like ‘Legion’ going into the pigs), the exorcist’s filmmaker friend says, “Oh dude! What about ‘all creatures great and small’?”
The filmmaker asks an actress if she’d like to play Noah’s wife, and says, “Yeah, I mean, he had a hundred wives or whatever, but after the first few, you know he’s only picking hotties.” (Side note: While there are plenty of polygamists in the Old Testament, Noah was not, so far as we know, one of them.)
A cultist sprays his own blood on the windshield of the filmmaker’s car, and the filmmaker says, “I just had the car detailed!”
After a lakeside shark attack and one character’s machine-gun response, another character says, “There’s no way that shark could have taken all those bullets.”
I will confess, though, that I found it kind of weirdly endearing how the exorcist, upon going to Mount Ararat and seeing the Ark for the first time, pats its wooden hull and says, “Hello, old girl.” I know it’s traditional in our culture to think of boats as feminine, but I’m not sure I’d ever seen the Ark gendered or personified like that before.
But that moment comes very late in the film, and by that point, I was getting restless and could only watch the film in ten-minute chunks—and this, despite the fact that the film is only 71 minutes long to begin with. I do love the title Noah’s Shark, and I am absolutely serious when I say I’d love to see a real genre mash-up—with Noah and the animals teaming up against a sea beast or whatever—but this movie isn’t it.
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I don’t know about other countries, but in Canada, Noah’s Shark is currently streaming on Tubi and Amazon Prime. Behold the trailer, if you dare: